Currently, we have over 8,000 courses and 270 communities that are stored on the Blackboard production server. Most of those courses are older then one year, and many date back as far as Fall 2000. As a result of this growth, during the summer, OIT will be archiving all courses older then one year. The courses will be placed on a seperate server and gradually removed from the production server. Doing this will accomplish several things:
1. It will reduce the load on the production server and could improve performance during peak use times.
2. It will reduce the number of courses that appear on the "myBlackboard" tab of students, and faculty.
3. It will reduce the amount of time it takes OIT to complete a course backup. Again helping to reduce stress on the system cpu and overall system performance.
All of the archived courses will be available to faculty but not to students and content from these courses can continue to be copied into existing or future courses.
OIT has developed a white paper that outlines the entire process in detail. Please feel free to review it for more information.
If you have any questions or concerns, please contact John Fritz at fritz@umbc.edu, or Bob Armstrong at rarmstro@umbc.edu.